And so my first week as a day trader has come to an end. I’ve gone through countless videos and webinars explaining the dos and don’ts, chart patterns, rules, participated in chat and forums, stared endlessly at my Level 2 screen and Real time charts.
All in all, through my profits and losses, I broke even – my net profits were actually higher than my losses but commissions are a B**ch when dealing with low volume trades, which brought me to about $(3) for this first week.
I took this week as a discovery session to get the hang of trading, getting familiar with the research, the tools, and the players.
These are the stocks I traded:
- $DGLY, 2x, loss and profit
- $JRJC, loss
- $HPJ, profit
- $MOBI, loss
- $BDR, loss
You can check out my first 5 trades and my 6th trade on their respective posts.
Here are some of the lessons that I learned from this week:
- #1 Rules – cut your losses quickly and stick to your percentages
- Patience is a virtue, use it.
- Don’t listen to what others have to say, trade on facts and chart patterns.
- Understand how the news are related to a given stock – This was essential in predicting the move for $DGLY that turned into a nice starter profit
- Don’t Ever force a trade – If there’s no play, there’s no play. Entering a position uninformed is not going to change.
- Trading emotionless and treating the numbers as a game is helpful: once emotions are out of the equation, making rational decisions becomes easier.
- Do not try to recover from previous losses.
- Treat each trade as if it were your first – no previous history, no losses and no gains
- Listen to the experienced people in the field.
- It is important to know when to not get into a trade
These are basically the main things that I took note of during this first week of trading.
After a good weekend of rest, I am now ready to take on the next week and tackle my opponents. I’ll choose my fights wisely and learn everything I can about those I’ll face. I won’t play big, but I will play smart.
My master used to say :
– Master: “If you opponent bigga, stwonga and faster than you, what you do?”
– Students: (……..)
– Master: “You use stwatagi and twick him to fall in you twap”
Translation: Planning and strategy is everything to beating an opponent.
And so the training continues, relentless, and the journey to become a master of the red and green to reach a million dollars goes on.